Authors: Philip Roth
He arrived in Madamaska Falls close to one
A.M
. Exhausted as he was, he drove to the lake and then followed Fox Run Crossing up past the inn to where the Baliches lived atop the hill overlooking the water, in a new house as spacious and lavish as any on the mountain. The house was the realization for Matija of a dream—the dream of a grand family castle that was a country unto itself—and
the dream dated back to elementary school, when, for homework, he had to write about his parents and tell the teacher truthfully, like a good Pioneer, what their relationship was to the regime. Matija had even brought a blacksmith over from Yugoslavia, an artisan from the Dalmatian coast, to stay for six months in the inn’s annex and work at a forge near Blackwall where he made the outdoor railings for the vast green terrace that looked onto the sunsets staged at the western end of the lake, the indoor banisters for the wide central staircase that twisted up toward a dome ceiling, and the filigreed iron entrance gates operated electronically from the house. The iron chandelier had come by sea from Split. Matija’s brother was a contractor and he had bought it from gypsies who sold all that kind of antique stuff. The chain forged for the chandelier by the resident blacksmith hung menacingly down the two stories from the sky-blue dome into a foyer where there were leaded stained-glass window panels to either side of a mahogany double door. Through the doorway you could have driven a horse-drawn carriage onto the marble floor (cut especially for the house after Matija had gone to Vermont to inspect the quarry). It seemed to Sabbath—the first day that Matija had taken Silvija to see the sights, and Drenka was fucked on Silvija’s bed in Silvija’s dirndl—that no two rooms in the house were level with each other but had to be reached by going up or down three, four, or five highly varnished, broad steps. And there were wood carvings of kings on pedestals beside the stairways between the rooms. A Boston antiques dealer had found them in Vienna—seventeen medieval kings who, together, had to have beheaded at least as many of their subjects as Matija had beheaded chickens for his popular chicken paprikash with noodles. There were six beds in the house, all with brass frames. The pink marble Jacuzzi could seat six. The modernistic kitchen with the state-of-the-art cooking island at its heart could seat sixteen. The dining room with the tapestried walls could seat thirty. Nobody, however, used the Jacuzzi or entered the dining room, the Baliches slept in just one claustrophobic bed, and the prepared food they carried up from the inn late at night, they ate in front of a TV
console installed on four empty egg crates in a room as barren and humble as any you could have found in a worker’s housing block built by Tito.
Because Matija was fearful lest his good fortune arouse envy in his guests no less than in his staff, the house had deliberately been situated behind a triangular expanse of firs said to be as old as any in New England. The stand of trees pointed dramatically heavenward, stately schooner masts that had been spared the colonial ax, and yet the roof lines of Matija’s million-dollar house—conforming to his fanciful immigrant aim—looked at first glance to be going in every direction
except
up. Strange. The tamed, abstemious, frugal foreigner, beneficiary not merely of his own dedicated hard work but of the fat-cat blowout of the eighties, conceives for himself a palace of abundance, as grand a manifestation as he can imagine of his personal triumph over Comrade Tito, while his wife’s intemperate lover, the native-born American hog, lives in a four-room little box built without a basement in the 1920s, a pleasant enough house by now but one that only Roseanna’s ingenuity with a paintbrush and a sewing machine, and a hammer and nails, had been able to salvage from the dank Tobacco Road horror it was when, in the mid-sixties, Roseanna came up with the bright idea of domesticating Sabbath. Home and Hearth. The woods, the streams, the snow, the thaw, the spring, New England’s spring, that surprise that is among the greatest reinvigorators of humankind on record. She pinned her hopes on the mountainous north—and a child. A family: a mother, a father, cross-country skis, and the kids, a lively, healthy band of shrieking kids, running unmenaced all over the place, enabled, by the very air they breathed, to avoid growing up like their malformed parents, entirely at the mercy of living. Rural domestication, the city dweller’s old agrarian dream of “Live Free or Die” license plates on the Volvo, was the purifying rubric not simply by which she hoped and prayed she could put to rest her father’s ghost but by which Sabbath could silence Nikki’s. Little wonder Roseanna was in orbit from there on out.
There were no lights on at the Baliches’, at least not that Sabbath could see through the fir-tree wall. He tapped twice on the
horn, waited, tapped twice, and then sat for ten minutes till it was time to tap the horn once again and allow her five minutes more before driving away.
Drenka was a light sleeper. She’d become a light sleeper when she became a mother. The smallest noise, the tiniest cry of distress from little Matthew’s room, and she was out of the bed and had him in her arms. She told Sabbath that when Matthew was a baby she would lie down and sleep on the floor beside his crib to be certain that he didn’t stop breathing. And even when he got to be four and five, she would sometimes be seized in her bed by fears for his safety or his health and spend the night on the floor of his room. She had done her mothering the way she did everything, as though she were breaking down a door. Lead her into temptation, into motherhood, into software, you got the impress of all of her, all that rash energy without a single restraint. In full force this woman was extraordinary. To whatever was demanded, she had no aversion. Fear, of course, plenty of fear; but aversions, none. An amazing experience, this thoroughly unaloof Slav for whom her existence was a great experiment, the erotic light of his life, and he had found her not dangling a little key from her finger on Rue St. Denis between Châtelet and the archway of the Porte St. Denis but in Madamaska Falls, capital of caution, where the local population is content to be in raptures about changing the clock twice a year.
He rolled down the window and heard the Baliches’ horses breathing in the paddock across the road. Then he saw two of them looming up by the fence. He opened a Stolichnaya bottle. He’d been drinking some since he went to sea but never like Roseanna. That moderation—and circumcision—were about all he had to show for being a Jew. Which was probably the best of it, anyway. He took two drinks and there she was, in her nightgown, with a shawl drawn around her shoulders. He reached out the window and there
they
were. Two hundred and sixty miles round-trip, but it was worth it for Drenka’s breasts.
“What is it? Mickey, what’s wrong!”
“Not much chance of a blow job, I guess.”
“Darling,
no
.”
“Get in the car.”
“No. No. Tomorrow.”
He took her flashlight out of her hand and shined it into his lap.
“Oh, it’s so big. My darling! I can’t now. Maté—”
“If he wakes up before I come, fuck it, we’ll run away, we’ll do it—I’ll just turn on the motor and off we go like Vronsky and Anna. Enough of this hiding-out shit. Our whole
lives
are hiding.”
“I mean Matthew. He’s working. He could come by.”
“He’ll think we’re kids necking. Get in, Drenka.”
“We
can’t
. You’re crazy. Matthew knows the car. You’re drunk. I have to go back! I love you!”
“Roseanna may be out tomorrow.”
“But,” she exclaimed, “I thought two more
weeks!
”
“What am I supposed to do with this thing?”
“You know what.” Drenka leaned in through the open window, squeezed it, jerked it once—“Go
home
,” she pleaded and then ran for the path back to the house.
On the fifteen-minute drive to Brick Furnace Road, Sabbath saw only one other vehicle on the road, the state police cruiser. That’s why she was up—listening to the scanner. Warming to the biblical justice of being taken in for adulterous sodomy by her son, he sounded his horn and flashed his brights; but for the time being, the run of bad luck appeared to have ended. Nobody came tearassing after the county’s leading sex offender and had him pull over to surrender his license and registration; no one invited him to justify how he came to be driving with a vodka bottle in his steering hand and a dick in the other, his focus not at all on the highway, not even on Drenka, but on that child’s face that masked a mind whose core was all clarity, on that lanky blond with the droopy shoulders and the delicate voice and the freshly sliced wrist,who was just three weeks clear of going completely off the rails.
♦ ♦ ♦
“‘Pray, do not mock me. / I am a very foolish fond old man, / Four score and upward, not an hour more nor less,
/
I And, to deal plainly, / I fear I am not in my perfect mind. / Methinks . . .’”
Then he lost it, one stop north of Astor Place went completely dry. Yet remembering even that much while begging in the subway on the way to Linc’s funeral after the soft-porn drama with the Cowans’ Rosa was a huge mnemonic surprise. Methinks what? Methinking methoughts shouldn’t be hard. The mind is the perpetual motion machine. You’re not ever free of anything. Your mind’s in the hands of
everything
. The personal’s an immensity, nuncle, a constellation of detritus that doth dwarf the Milky Way; it pilots thee as do the stars the blind Cupid’s arrow o’ wild geese that o’erwing the Drenka goose’d asshole as, atop thy cancerous Croatian, their coarse Canadian honk thou libid’nously mimics, inscribing ’pon her malignancy, with white ink, thy squandered chromosomal mark.
Back up, back way, way up. Nikki says, “Sir, do you know me?” Lear says, “You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?” Cordelia says blah, blah; the doctor says blah, blah; I say, “Where have I been? Where am I? Fair daylight? I am mightily abused . . . blah, blah, blah.” Nikki: “O look upon me, sir, / And hold your hand in benediction o’er me. / No, sir, you must not kneel.” And Lear says it was a Tuesday in December 1944, I came home from school and saw some cars, I saw my father’s truck. Why is that there? I knew something was wrong. In the house I saw my father. In terrible pain. In terrible pain. My mother hysterical. Her hands. Her fingers. Moaning. Screaming. People there already. A man had come to the door. “I’m sorry,” he said and gave her the telegram. Missing in action. Another month before the second telegram arrived, a tentative, chaotic time—hope, fear, searching for any story we could get, the phone ringing, never knowing, stories reaching us that he had been picked up by friendly Filipino guerrillas, someone in his squadron said he passed him in the flight, he was going on the last run, the flak got very bad and Morty’s plane went down, but in friendly territory . . . and Lear replies, “You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave,” but Sabbath is remembering the second telegram. The month before was terrible but not as terrible as this: the death notice was like losing
another
brother. Devastating. My mother in bed. Thought
she
was dying, afraid she was going to die too. Smelling salts. The
doctor. The house filling up with people. It’s hard to be clear about who was there. It’s a blur. Everybody was there. But life was over. The family was finished. I was finished. I gave her smelling salts and they spilled and I was afraid I killed her. The tragic period of my life. Between fourteen and sixteen. Nothing to compare with it. It didn’t just break her, it broke us all. My father, for the rest of his life, completely changed. He was a reassuring force to me, because of his physique and because he was so dependable. My mother was always the more emotional one. The sadder one, the happier one. Always whistling. But there was an impressive sobriety in my father. So to see
him
fall apart! Look at my emotions now—I’m fifteen remembering this stuff. Emotions, when they’re revved up, don’t change, they’re the same, fresh and raw. Everything passes?
Nothing
passes. The same emotions are here! He was my
father
, a hardworking guy, out in the truck to the farmers at three in the morning. When he came home at night he was tired and we had to be quiet because he had to get up so early. And if he was ever angry—and that was rare—but if he was ever angry, he was angry in Yiddish and it was terrifying because I couldn’t even be sure what he was angry about. But after, he was never angry again. If only he had been! After, he became meek, passive, crying all the time, crying everywhere, in the truck, with the customers, with the Gentile farmers. This fucking thing
broke
my father! After the
shiva
he went back to work again, after the year of official mourning he stopped crying, but there was always that personal, private misery that you could see a mile away. And I didn’t feel so terrific myself. I felt I lost a part of my body. Not my prick, no, can’t say a leg, an arm, but a feeling that was physiological and yet an interior loss. A hollowing out, as though I’d been worked on with a chisel. Like the horseshoe-crab shells lying along the beach, the armature intact and the inside empty. All of it gone. Hollowed out. Reamed out. Chiseled away. It was so oppressive. And my mother going to bed—I was
sure
I was going to lose my mother. How will she survive? How will any of us survive? There was such an emptiness everywhere. But I had to be the strong one. Even
before
I had to be the strong one. Very
tough when he went overseas and all we knew was his APO number. The anxiety. Excruciating. Worried all the time. I used to help my father with the deliveries the way Morty did. Morty did things that nobody in his right mind would have done. Clambering around up on the roof fixing something. On his back, shimmying all the way into the dark crud under the porch, wiring something. Every week he washed the floors for my mother. So now I washed the floors. I did a lot of things to try to calm her down after he shipped out to the Pacific. Every week we used to go to the movies. They wouldn’t go near a war movie. But even during an ordinary movie, when something suddenly cropped up about the war or somebody just said something about somebody overseas, my mother would get upset and I would have to calm her down. “Ma, it’s just a movie.” “Ma, let’s not think about it.” She would cry. Terribly. And I’d leave with her and walk her around. We used to get letters through the APO. He’d do little cartoons on the envelope sometimes. I’d looked forward to the cartoons. But the only one they cheered up was me. And once he flew over the house. He was stationed in North Carolina and he had to make a flight to Boston. He told us, “I’m going to fly over the house. In a B-25.” All the women were outside in the street in their aprons. In the middle of the day my father came home in the truck. My friend Ron was there. And Morty did it—flew over and dipped his wings, those flat gull wings. Ron and I were waving. What a hero he was to me. He was incredibly gentle with me, five years younger—he was just so gentle. He had a real physique. A shot-putter. A track star. He could heave a football almost the whole length of the field; he had a tremendous capacity to toss a ball or to put the shot—to throw things, that was his skill, to throw them far. I would think of that after he was missing. In school I would be thinking that throwing things far might help him survive in the jungle. Shot down on the twelfth of December and died of wounds on the fifteenth. Which was another misery. They had him in a hospital. The rest of the crew was killed instantly, but the plane was shot down over guerrilla territory and the guerrillas got him out and to a hospital and he lived for three
days. That made it even worse.
The crew was killed immediately and my brother lived three more days
. I was in a stupor. Ron came. Usually he as good as lived at our house. He said, “Come on out.” I said, “I can’t.” He said, “What happened?” I couldn’t talk. It took a few days before I could tell him. But I couldn’t tell people at school. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t
say
it. There was a gym teacher, a big, strong guy who had wanted Morty to give up track and train as a gymnast. “How’s your brother?” he would ask me. “Fine,” I’d say. I couldn’t say it. Other teachers, his shop teacher, who always gave him A’s: “How’s your brother doing?” “Fine.” And then they finally knew, but I never told them. “Hey, how’s Morty doing?” And I perpetuated the lie. This went on and on with the people who hadn’t heard. I was in my stupor for a year at least. I even got scared for a while of girls’ having lipstick and having tits. Every challenge was suddenly too great. My mother gave me his watch. It nearly killed me, but I wore it. I took it to sea. I took it to the Army. I took it to Rome. Here it is, his GI Benrus. Wind it daily. All that’s changed is the strap. Stop function on the second hand still working. When I was on the track team I used to think about his ghost. That was the first ghost. I was like my father and him, always strong up top. Besides, Morty threw the shot, so I
had
to. I
imbued
myself with him. I used to look up at the sky before I threw it and think that he was looking over me. And I called for strength. It was a state meet. I was in fifth place. I knew the unreality of it but I just kept praying to him and I threw it farther than I ever did before. I still didn’t win, but I had got his strength!